How to restart the Touch Bar on a Mac when it stops working

• You can restart the Touch Bar on a Mac when it freezes or stops.
• Try to restart the Touch Bar by stopping the Control Strip service in Activity Monitor.
• If the Touch Bar is still not working, you can stop the Touch Bar service using the Terminal app.

The MacBook's Touch Bar is a controversial feature; it looks futuristic and seems like a luxe addition to your MacBook Pro, but many users find it's not always useful. And for many users, it's prone to occasionally freezing or not responding. If you sometimes experience glitches with your Touch Bar, rest assured that it's easy to fix without restarting your MacBook.

How to restart the Touch Bar on a Mac

You can restart the Touch Bar's background process using the Activity Monitor. Here is what to do:

1. Start the Finder and then search for "activity." Double-click Activity Monitor when you see it in the Finder.

2. In the Activity Monitor, search for "control." When you see Control Strip, select it.

3. Click the X at the top of the Activity Monitor window and then click Quit to confirm you want to shut down the service. It'll immediately restart.

Test the Touch Bar. If it's still not working, restart the Touch Bar via the Terminal app:

1. Start the Finder and then search for "terminal." Double-click Terminal when you see it in the Finder.

2. In the Terminal window, type sudo pkill TouchBarServer; and press Enter.

3. You will be asked to enter your administrator password. Enter it now.

4. Type sudo killall "ControlStrip"; and press Enter.

The Touch Bar should restart and work normally again.

Quick tip: When typing in the terminal, punctuation like the semicolon is part of the command and you need to include it. Enter it exactly the way you see it here.